Conversational Search on Google Promises to Make Searching Easier Than Ever

Google has, in their own words, brought “Star Trek” to the search engine you already know and use.

Google’s new conversational search was announced less than a week ago and has generated massive amounts of buzz in the few short days since. The new version of Google’s search engine has been formatted to work with natural human speech patterns. Not only does it recognize voice commands regardless of any accent, it can “link concepts” and search based off of previous searches.

A simple “OK, Google,” starts any search, as it does with Google Glasses, and the search engine attempts to “grasp” what the user is trying to find when a command is spoken. For example, “Show me pictures of Santa Monica pier,” can be followed up with “how far is that from here?” without using any specific nouns to describe what the user wants. As Google says, conversational search simply “remembers”.

It’s easy to start a conversation. You simply click the microphone icon on the search box and speak to Google. Although the tool isn’t perfected, it does know that “here” means “user’s present location” and it also understands pronouns when referring to locations or people. If it doesn’t understand, it will simply tell you that it doesn’t, and ask you to search again.

The biggest push with the new conversational Google search is that instead of making a user visit a webpage to gather information on a topic, location, or website, Google has built-in bios for assorted locations that can be edited by the owner (as long as the changes are appropriate to the business). This feature as well has not yet been perfected, but it is currently being tested in select areas. Conversational search is still in the development stage, but the demonstration can be viewed here.

We’ve all respected Google because of the way it drives traffic to websites, blogs, and businesses, and the way these new features are going to change that is not clear at the present time.